LETTER: But then, there is the other side

Wednesday

Aug 30, 2017 at 12:01 AM

In response “A different kind of slavery” on Aug. 26:

When I think of slavery, I think of a big two-story white house with a big porch and tall columns, a genteel-man in a white suit, wearing a Panama hat, carrying a cane with a brass knob on the handle and a whisky flask in his coat pocket. The women would be all fair maidens with big busts, dressed in gowns with low necklines and a bustle, sitting in the parlor reciting poetry or playing a peddle organ. This was no fairy tale.

But then there is another side — the side that makes all of this possible.

I think of human beings working from sun to sun, being hung up by their arms and beaten with a bull whip or buggy whip until their flesh is literally stripped from their bodies, sons being castrated because they looked at a white girl in the wrong way, a pubescent daughter used as a sex-toy for her owner or his sons and at the end of the day there is no choice but to get up the next morning and expect the same thing to happen again. There is no place to go; there is no place to hide.

From the article: “Bringing up slavery of all things, they have never experienced firsthand at all” and “History, never to be brought back or changed.”

These human beings were treated as property just like the family dog or the mules. Their names and genealogy would be recorded in a book along with the other livestock. They could be “sold down the river” into a worse hell.

No, I thank God that I never experienced slavery. I do not have to be run over by a Mack truck to know that I would not enjoy that experience, either.

In reference to history, we can do more than condemn it and we start to do that by not glorifying it for our personal gratification. No, we cannot change it, but we can do our best to rectify the results.

Harry Daniel, Asheboro

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